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Three weeks after Rich was buried, Marge told everyone to start calling her Margaret.
Marge had been a childhood nickname bestowed upon her by her father that just stuck. She didn’t mind it as a young girl, when she could hear the affection dripping from each syllable, but by the time she reached middle school, she felt it was horribly childish. The name was already her name at that point however, and she left the desire to change it alone until Rich was dead and Ronnie was gone.
“I’ll call you whatever you want, honey, I just don’t understand where this is coming from.” Her mother had responded, placing a plate of meatloaf in front of her at the table. “We’ve called you Marge since you were two years old.”
The thirteen-year-old shrugged. “Marge is a little girl name, and I’m not a little girl anymore.”
Little girls didn’t have dead almost-boyfriends who died saving their lives. Little girls didn’t have nightmares about their eyes bulging out of their heads, about being trapped in a space too tight to breathe, about a row of rotten teeth about to close in on their head. Little girls didn’t lose sleep over the thought of a son that they haven’t met yet.
So Marge became Margaret.
Another three weeks after the name-change and Margaret’s doctor informed her that her eye was officially healed. All that would remain was a sharp white scar across her eyelid, unnoticeable when her eyes were open.
She had stared at the eye-patch in her hands that night, feeling the soft leather with her thumb. She always thought that as soon as her eye was healed that she would dump everything related to it- the gauze and the patches and eyedrops that she hated. But she couldn’t get rid of the patch, not when she remembered how gently Rich had handed it over to her, how his smile was brighter than the sun when she snapped it into place.
The patch got tucked away in her dresser.
Margaret, Lilly, and Will were inseparable those first few months. They spent nearly every waking moment together, watching movies at the Aladdin (even though Lilly’s hands always clench into fists when the lights first dim, face ashen and lips wobbling) and skipping stones and studying at the library.
Lilly came knocking on Margaret’s window one winter night. Margaret had popped it open, startled, and her oldest friend had been standing there in a nightgown.
“Margie,” Lilly started quietly, before seeming to remember herself. “Margaret. Sorry. I had a horrible dream and- and- and I just needed to make sure that you were okay.”
Margaret helped Lilly through the window. They stood in front of each other, bodies trembling until Margaret had wrapped Lilly in a tight hug. “I’m okay.”
Lilly stayed the night with her. They knew that they only had a few hours before Lilly would have to slip back out the window before her mother noticed that she was gone or before Margaret’s parents came to check on her, but at that moment, Lilly stayed.
It was silent between them for a while, so long that Margaret had thought that Lilly fell asleep, until Lilly had asked her in a whisper, “Do you ever think about him?”
“Who, Rich?” She asked. This was a common topic of conversation between them and Will, even though it carved Margaret’s heart out of her chest every time.
“No.” Lilly said, turning to look her in the eyes. “Your… the son that he told you about. Your son.”
Margaret swallowed thickly, looking back up at the ceiling. Hot tears burned her eyes and she shut them tight to keep them from falling. “All the time.”
Lilly never asked about him again.
The farm that the Hanlons bought was too far out of town for Will to go to school every day, so Mrs. Hanlon homeschooled him. She greeted the girls with a fond smile each time they showed up, like some sort of private inside joke that was only meant for everyone who was on the ice that day.
But time marches on
(or back, a giddy little voice in her head reminds her. Time doesn’t exist! Birth and death are all the same, and I’ll keep going back, and back, and back, until your fifteenth great grandmother has my teeth around her heart)
And things change.
Lilly and her mother moved to Portland to be closer to family a year after everything with the clown went down. Until then, Margaret wasn’t sure how much she bought into the Forgetting that Will often spoke to them about. His only evidence had been Ronnie, but Ronnie wouldn’t be able to write to them anyways without risking her dad getting in trouble. Plus, if Margaret ever had the opportunity to leave Derry, she doesn’t think she would ever look back either.
But Lilly leaves and Margaret never hears from her again.
To Margaret’s shame, her and Will grow apart soon after. The farm is far away and Margaret makes new friends at school and they went from speaking every day, to once a week, to waving at each other with a friendly smile if they happened to come across each other on Main Street.
And maybe, in some cruel way, Margaret was grateful. Sometimes she would look at Will and only see Rich.
She would see the two of them laughing shamelessly together, Rich’s eyes closed with the force of his smile. She would see how Will had danced with her that night at the Black Spot, giddy with the sound of Rich pounding on the drums like he was born to do it. She would see Will’s head resting on Rich’s limp shoulder, covered in soot, crying softly as he said goodbye to his best friend.
Everything in this town reminded her of Rich, and she hated that her last friend who could understand what they all went through did the most.
The first time she gets asked on a date again is her senior year of high school, four years after everything happened. A boy in her chemistry class with an easy grin and slicked-back hair asks her if she wants to get shakes and burgers from the local diner.
“So, what do you like to do?” Margaret asked, lips pressed against the straw of her chocolate shake. “For fun, I mean?”
The boy, Tommy, had smiled at her. “I’m in a band with my brother and his friends.”
"Oh?”
“Yeah. I play drums.”
Margaret’s lips left the straw.
“Come on, Marge! The roof is coming down!”
She closed her eyes against the sudden onslaught of emotions that rose up within her. She could have sworn that she smelt the smoke and burning flesh that haunted her nightmares, but when she opened her eyes the diner looked just as it did before.
“That’s nice.” She said stiffly.
Tommy kissed her when he dropped her off at home that night. It was sort of embarrassing having her first kiss at seventeen, but even more embarrassing how much she hated it. It felt like kissing a fish, and the image almost made her giggle until she barely managed to stifle it.
When he asked her to go on another date the following weekend, Margaret said no. She knew that they wouldn’t end up together anyways; his last name was Bass.
Margaret graduated high school in 1967 and celebrated by chugging back a bottle of her father’s whiskey and falling asleep in the back of a truck bed. She woke up missing her right shoe and a portion of her hair was charred like it had been burnt.
She got a job at Freese’s Department Store one week later.
As a child, she used to imagine that she would be a ballerina. The only time she had ever left Derry was when she was eleven years old and her parents took her for a trip down to New York City. They had gone to see the New York Ballet, and Margaret had watched with wide eyes for the entire ninety minutes, entranced. That’s all she wanted to do when she grew up.
Stocking shelves at Freese’s is significantly less glamorous, but it gets her a steady paycheque and an apartment downtown with decent plumbing.
Margaret goes on more dates with more guys that she knows it is not written in the stars that she will marry. Some of them are sweet, like Wayne Packer, with his quiet demeanor and habit of cracking his knuckles when he is nervous. Some of them are cruel, like Tony Amato, who was a regular at Freese’s and who kicked Margaret out of his car and made her walk home in the rain after she pushed him away when he tried to kiss her.
It was when she was walking home in the rain that night, makeup running down her cheeks and hair sticking to the back of her neck, and she thought about how much easier her life would be if Rich were still alive.
He would be her high school sweetheart. They would live in that little crappy apartment together while Rich had a nice office job that his papá got him even though he would spend his weekends playing for his band. Margaret would go to all their shows and they would walk home together, hand-in-hand, giggling about old middle school memories. She would make fun of him for writing poems in his shoe and they would be saving up to buy a real nice summer house in Bar Harbour and Rich would cry when Margaret told him that she was pregnant. Their children would speak spanglish and be just like Rich, with his toothy grin and stupid jokes and Margaret would thank God every day for her life.
“Hey, sweetheart.” A voice appeared beside Maragret. It was an older man, hanging out of the window of his car. She could see the specks of food caught in his beard and the fat hanging from his arms. “Need a ride home, baby cakes? It’s not safe for a little lady like you to be walking out here in the rain.”
Margaret stared at him a beat, then said, “Fuck off.”
“We don’t just pee in pots. We also protect fair maidens.”
There was no one like Rich Santos, and if she just told Mr. Tozier to fuck off (geez, she hoped that’s not her future husband), so be it.
Life went on, and Margaret liked to think that she did remarkably well at hiding all the skeletons in her closet. She had friends that she would go to tennis club with that seemed to like her just fine. She had closed her eyes against the sweltering summer sun one afternoon and Andrea Cohen had grabbed her wrist and leaned in closer.
“Margaret, what happened to your eye?” She tapped her own eyelid for emphasis. “It’s all marked up.”
“Oh, just an accident when I was a kid.” She laughed, but all she could think about was the sound the machine made when he sliced through her eyeballs. “In shop class, actually.”
Andrea cringed and shivered. Margaret often found herself wondering about the lives of other kids who grew up in Derry, kids who knew that there was something fundamentally wrong but never faced off with evil itself.
She thought it must be unfathomable to people like Andrea Cohen or Lois Ripsom. If Margaret had looked them in the eye and told them that she has a scar on her eyelid because she was possessed by a child-eating, time-traveling entity that was after her because he had a score to settle with her unborn son, Margaret would be locked up in Juniper Hill within three days.
Margaret was good at hiding, until she wasn't.
Three years after she started working at Freese’s, she was searching for a specific set of bedsheets in the storage room that a customer had requested when the door behind her had shut suddenly.
Margaret turned and grabbed the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge. This storage room was cramped; if she put her arms straight out on either side, she would be touching each side of the wall.
She pounded on the door, heart beating faster. “Hey! I’m stuck in here! Laura? Are you there? I can’t get the door open!”
There was no response from Laura, who had been stocking shelves just a few feet away from the storage room minutes earlier. Everything suddenly felt too small, too cramped. Margaret felt sick. She pounded harder on the door, slapping the metal.
“Hey, hey, I’m in here!” Her voice was torn, terror seeping through the edges, and Margaret…
Marge was back in that box.
Hot. So hot. Everything was burning. The edges of the box were hot. She pounds her fists against it but it won’t move. She can hear Rich’s raspy breaths above her, broken up by bouts of coughing that sounds thick with mucus. She wanted to say more, wanted to beg him to let her out so that he wouldn’t have to be alone up there, but they had just exchanged I Love Yous and she fears any other words will break this spell of peace. He was inches away from her but he was so far, and she can’t get to him, she can never get to him, she’ll never be strong enough-
Light hit her eyes.
Laura was there with wide eyes as she held open the door. Margaret only realized then that she was backed into the corner of the room, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Margaret?” Laura whispered. “What’s wrong?”
Margaret stood and shouldered past Laura. She sat in the break room for thirty minutes, head in her hands, cursing that stupid clown and the men who had stormed into the Black Spot and the whole horrible town.
She was at the tennis club one warm August morning in 1971 when a man that she hadn't seen before slid into the seat beside her.
“Hi.”
Margaret turned to face him. He was handsome. That’s the first thought that popped into her head. He had dark hair and a sharp jaw and this slightly crooked smile that made something spark in Margaret’s heart.
“Hi.” She said back.
“I, uh, I’m new and town and I was told that there is a beautiful woman at the tennis club who gives free tours around the city.” His eyes didn’t leave her, and she noticed that they were the deepest shade of brown, like dirt after rain.
Margaret pretended to look around the club. “Oh, and which woman is she?”
“Well, I wasn’t told her name but she wasn’t hard to pick out.” He shrugged. “So, I’d love to hear it now.”
Margaret grinned, something lovely buzzing under her skin. “Margaret.”
He reached his hand out. “Wentworth. Everyone just calls me Went. And how do you feel about nicknames, Margaret?”
“I could take them or leave them.”
“Then I’ll call you Maggie.”
Margaret narrowed her eyes, trying to stop the smile that was curving on her lips. “Why Maggie?”
“Because I’ve met a lot of Margarets,” Went said slowly, scanning her face. “But you’re not like anyone I have ever met before.”
She burst out laughing. “Do you feed that line to every girl at the tennis club?”
“Only the remarkably beautiful ones named Maggie.” He said.
She mulled it over in her head. Maggie. She liked that. She liked being Margaret because she liked being an adult but, as adulthood has taught her, there isn’t much to like about it. And he didn’t call her Marge. She didn’t think that she would be able to handle that.
“Oh, Margaret!” Andrea slipped over and tossed an arm around Maggie’s shoulder, sending a coy smile to Went. Come to think of it, Maggie was pretty sure that she heard the other ladies talking about the new, hot dentist in town that one of their husbands invited to the tennis club. “I see you’ve met Dr. Tozier.”
“I’ve always wondered how you’d taste, Margaret Tozier.”
Maggie flinched bodily, so bad that wine sloshed around the edges of Andrea’s glass. Went and Andrea were both staring at her in concern. Maggie stared at him, heart thumping in her chest.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” Andrea whispered.
Maggie remembered herself too quickly. “Yeah, yeah, yes, I have.” She forced herself to smile, even though it made her feel dizzy. “And he is going to take me out tonight.”
Went smiled at her like the sun, like Rich did all those years ago.
Twenty-two months later, they are married.
Maggie always thought that she would never be able to fully rest once the pieces of her life slid into place, but she was wrong. Some days, she didn't even think about her conversation with It. She allowed herself to be immersed in the present, to be grateful for the fact that she was married to someone that she adored.
They bought a house in the nice neighborhood in Derry, near the high school. It had four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a finished basement, a white picket fence, a big backyard, and a kitchen where sunlight filtered through the window and cast brilliant rays across the tiled floor. Maggie adored it. She was proud to have one of the nicest houses out of anyone at the tennis club, even though she would never brag about such a thing out loud out of risk of sounding like Lois Ripsom.
While they were engaged, a friend of Went’s had told them about a position opening up as a secretary at a law firm downtown. Went insisted she take the job and she knew why; just because he was the breadwinner didn’t mean that she had to work at a department store. Her boss had nearly cried when she told him that she was quitting Freese’s; after six years there, she had worked her way up to assistant manager.
Maggie eased into the normalcy of her life, sometimes forgetting entirely about those horrible weeks in 1962, but inevitably, some things slipped through the cracks.
She woke up screaming that her eyes were going to fall out of their sockets one night a couple months after they got married, and Went had rubbed her back but still looked ashen and terrified.
When she had admitted to him that she was claustrophobic after they got stuck in a crowd of people at an Elton John concert and she nearly vomited, he had gently asked her if something had happened to make her that way.
“When I was a little girl, I got…” Maggie trailed off, unsure of how she was supposed to bare her soul to him even though they exchanged vows to love each other through everything. “Me and my friends got stuck in a fire. We were trapped in the building.”
She didn’t tell him more. She couldn’t.
A year-and-a-half into their marriage Went had joked that Maggie must be taking birth control behind his back, because it seemed nearly impossible that she wasn’t pregnant yet.
Maggie had smiled stiffly and told him that it would happen sooner or later.
For their two-year anniversary, Went takes her down to Myrtle Beach. It’s a beautiful weekend. Six weeks and one ultrasound later Maggie told Went that she was pregnant.
“I’m gonna’ be a dad, Maggie.” Went had whispered giddily into her hair as they embraced. If he could feel how hard her heart was pounding, he didn’t mention it. He pulled back to look at her with that boyish smile that she adored. “And you’re gonna’ be a mom.”
“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Richie in the baby carriage!”
Maggie gripped onto him tighter. There was something cosmic happening within her, something that she was powerless to stop.
Andrea (who had become Andrea Uris a few months earlier after marrying the Rabbi) kept asking Maggie if she thought it was a boy or a girl.
“You’re carrying higher.” Andrea said. “I bet it’s a baby girl. Baby girls are always higher.”
“You think?” Maggie asked. “I hope it’s a girl.”
Maggie prays for a girl. She’s not ready for that thing to come back, to watch her child suffer, to know that he may win in the end but that doesn’t mean that he’ll survive, and then he’ll be just like Rich, a hero but dead.
Maggie went into labour at the grocery store. A kind elderly man drove her to the hospital and called Went from the payphone outside. Went was there in a burst of chaotic energy within twenty minutes, as if he might miss it entirely.
He indeed didn’t miss it. The baby wasn’t born until twelve hours later.
“Please be a girl, please be a girl, please be a girl, please be a girl.” Maggie whispered under her breath as the nurses worked on the baby in the corner. She could feel the tears and sweat running down her face, and all she could do was pray.
One of the nurses turned back to Maggie and Went and handed Maggie the baby, who was loosely swaddled in a white blanket.
“Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Tozier.” She said kindly. The baby was crying into Maggie’s shoulder. Her ears were ringing. “It’s a boy.”
Maggie’s head was static. She barely processed Went wrapping his hand around hers to hold the baby from the other side. All she knew was that this was the baby that she had prayed for, that she was terrified of, that she wished was some cruel joke for his own sake, so that he wouldn’t have to suffer like she did.
Hours later, after the sun dipped far below the horizon, the nurses sent Went home for the night. He had kissed her on the head and promised that he would be there in the morning to take them home. “Why don’t you think of some names?”
“Maybe you should do that.” Maggie whispered tiredly. She already knew how this was going to go. Went would come back in the morning with the name Richie in mind, and Maggie would have to smile and say that she loved it even though she would never be able to look at him without thinking of her Rich.
Went laughed. “You’re the one that did all the heavy lifting, honey.”
Maggie never knew if he noticed that she was practically catatonic, that she hadn’t once looked down at the baby.
The nurses left the baby in Maggie’s room for a while. She stared at him through the little crib pulled close to her bed, unable to force her hands to move to pick him up.
After a while, the baby started to cry miserably, little arms flailing. Something tightened in Maggie’s chest and her body had moved without her permission, wrapping her arms around the bundle of blankets and pulling him up to hold him from the hospital bed.
“Shh.” Maggie pressed her face close to his, nose brushing his tiny temple. “Don’t cry.”
The baby quieted quickly. His little hand found her hospital gown and he clutched it tight, chubby cheek squished into her shoulder. A moment passed and he yawned loudly, eyes squeezed shut.
Maggie laughed, but her voice was torn. Emotion rose up in her throat, and for the first time since she was thirteen, she didn’t try to wipe the tears away.
He was so beautiful. She had never seen something so beautiful in all her life, something so pure and perfect. Maggie was sure then that all roads led to that moment; her first time truly seeing her son.
“Don’t you recognize your little boy?”
Since marrying Went, Maggie tried not to dwell as often on the pretend future that she had made, the one where Rich was alive. It wasn’t fair to Went; not when he was so kind, and so handsome, and any woman in Derry would die to be his wife.
But staring down at this baby, all she could think about was Rich. Rich was not this baby’s father, but staring into his little eyes and watching his pink-ish fists curl over her heart made something snap within her. She saw Rich’s heart in this child, his joy, his soul that got taken before she ever got a chance to love him. How are you supposed to honour someone that died saving you?
“We don’t just pee in pots. We also protect fair maidens.”
Rich was gone, but this baby was alive, and maybe, just maybe, Rich was smiling down on her at that moment.
Richie Tozier. That had been the name on the missing poster that the clown showed her. Not Rich, because Rich was her first love, her hero, her knight. And Richie… Richie would be her baby. And she hoped that he would have Rich’s heart, that he would be a hero like him.
“Richie.” Maggie whispered. “I love you, Richie.”
The baby curled closer to her. Maggie choked back a sob. She thought about all the pain her son would go through, all the fear and suffering.
“I’m sorry. For everything.”
Went came to pick them up the following morning.
“Richard Michael Tozier.” Maggie told him. Michael was Went’s late father’s name. “We can call him Richie for short.”
Went had grinned at her and plucked Richie from her arms, blowing a raspberry into his cheek. Richie didn’t quite have the dexterity to laugh, but in Maggie’s mind, he looked happy. “Hi, Richie Tozier.”
Richie proved to be a very loud baby. Blessedly, it wasn’t the tears that were constant however; it was the babbling.
Maggie would walk by the nursery and hear Richie talking to himself in baby-butchered English. When she would play with him out in the living room, it sounded like they were having entire conversations with each other. He loved talking, and Maggie loved indulging him.
“Say hi to dada, Richie.” Maggie used his little hand to wave at Went as he came home from work. Richie flailed his little arms and smiled at his father. At eleven months old, he had not been actually talking yet, but Maggie thought he was getting close.
Went stayed where he was instead of picking Richie up, making silly faces at him from across the room. Richie slapped his hands together and poked his tongue out, babbling a string of nonsensical baby talk before-
“Dada!”
Went dropped his jacket on the ground and scooped Richie out of Maggie’s arms. Maggie thought that she could see tears in Went’s eyes.
“Traitor.” She whispered when Richie was back in her arms.
He said mama for the first time two weeks later. It was the day before his first birthday, and Maggie had left him in his hair chair for a moment to grab something from the living room. She couldn’t have been gone more than thirty seconds, but by the time she returned to the kitchen, Richie had fat tears streaming down his cheeks and was reaching out to her and said that word that she had waited a year to hear.
As he grew, he was a little ball of energy. He kept Maggie on her toes, with his constant running and jumping off of the coffee table and demanding Went play hide ‘n seek with him as soon as he got home from work.
Richie had a horrible talent for getting injured. Maggie lost count of how often he ran into walls or tripped over the leg of a chair. Went called him his clumsy little guy.
Richie made his first friend at the age of three. Andrea Uris and the Rabbi had a baby boy just a few months after Richie was born. Maggie saw him occasionally when Andrea brought him to the tennis club, and he was a sweet boy. She felt bad for him and Andrea. Donald Uris was a domineering presence, with his permanent scowl of displeasure. Andrea had come to Maggie right before the boy, Stanley’s, third birthday and admitted that he had yet to make any friends, asking if she would mind bringing Richie to play with him.
Maggie didn’t think that Richie would get along with Stanley Uris very well. Stanley was a very quiet boy, from what Maggie had seen, and Richie was… decidedly the opposite.
But when Maggie picked Richie up from the playdate, he came bouncing out with the biggest grin on his little face. “Mummy, can I play with Stan again soon?”
Stan became a permanent fixture in Richie’s childhood after that. He was over at the Tozier house often, so quiet and polite compared to Richie, but the two boys seemed to adore each other.
“Honey, did you hear about the fire downtown last night?” Went asked her from the breakfast table. Richie was running around with a toy truck and smashing it into the walls. “Two parents dead.”
Maggie hummed, barely paying attention, using her foot to move Richie’s track from the wall to the rest of the kitchen. The bottom of the walls were already all scuffed from various action figures.
She heard Went shuffle the pages of the newspaper, before reading, “... William and Jessica Hanlon.”
Maggie whipped her head around to face her husband. Something cold gripped her heart. “Will Hanlon?”
Went narrowed his eyes at her. “You know him?”
It sounded like there was water rushing through Maggie’s ears, all static, like it had been when she first gave birth. Her hands were shaking, she realized. “We… we went to school together.”
Went nodded and said something else, but Maggie couldn’t hear him.
Sweet Will. Brave Will. Gone in a fire. A fire, just like Rich. She felt hysterical. What kind of cruel trick was it for him to survive the Black Spot only to meet his end seventeen years later? And his poor wife…
The last time Maggie saw Will had been two years earlier. She was picking up a prescription from Keene’s with Richie and walked by a man that she immediately recognized as Will and an attractive woman pushing a stroller. They made eye contact and both paused for a moment, a lifetime of memories flashing between them, before they both went on their way with a watery smile.
“Their baby.” Maggie said suddenly. “He had a- a baby. Did it say if the baby is okay?”
Went glanced back down at the paper. “It says a three-year-old boy was rescued with minor injuries.”
Maggie blew out a shaky breath, turning away from Went to mop up her tears with the back of her hand.
She didn’t go to Will’s funeral. She sat in the church parking lot with her head against the steering wheel and prayed that, wherever they were, Lilly and Ronnie were safe.
Maggie caught Richie squinting at the TV when he was about four years old.
She had long since discarded her own glasses, swapping them out for contact lenses, but she recognized the expression on her son’s face as the same one she used to wear at that age when she could hardly see anything in front of her.
“I think Richie needs glasses.” Maggie said to Went as she crawled into bed next to him.
“You think?”
“I keep catching him squinting at things.”
Went shrugged. “He probably inherited your eyesight.”
Went found an old picture of Maggie recently from the seventh grade and got a big kick out of her coke-bottle glasses.
She brought Richie to the optometrist the following week and came out with a prescription for glasses that were suited for a blind person. The first time she saw him in those little glasses, she nearly gasped. It was the first time she ever thought that he was starting to look like the boy on the missing poster.
Maggie wished that her bad eyesight wasn’t the only thing this boy would inherit from her.
Richie started kindergarten not long often and, to Maggie's surprise, didn’t make any more friends. It was still just him and Stan, two peas in a pod. She loved listening to their conversations. Richie would make joke after joke and Stan would always respond in that dry way of this, wise beyond his five years.
It felt so familiar to her, and Maggie only realized why when she was dropping Stanley off at the Uris’ house after a playdate one evening.
Teddy Uris. That’s why the name was so familiar to her when Andrea first announced her engagement to the tennis club. The Rabbi had been Teddy’s older brother who was a few years ahead of them in school.
Maggie hardly knew Teddy Uris despite them going to school with each other for most of their lives. Besides a couple of school projects that they had been partnered up for and a few conversations, they were barely acquaintances. Despite this, she still knew of his friendship with Phil Malkin (another half-stranger). They sat behind her in English in the sixth grade.
That’s what she had been remembering all those times she felt a vague sense of nostalgia when she would hear Richie talk to Stan. She was hearing
(the smell was so rotten, horribly rotten, like dead bodies. The smell was dead bodies. It was Teddy and Phil and Phil’s little sister and Matty, because Matty wasn’t in front of them anymore- no, no, no, Matty was dead in the water. That thing in front of them was never Matty. And Phil had been gone for a long time. Marge hardly knew Phil but Lilly had been so insistent that they had to go save them, that Phil was one of the good guys, but Phil was dead and rotten and perhaps he always had been)
Phil and Teddy.
Maggie had a dream that night that she was back there, in the sewers. Ronnie kept shouting for Phil. There was this horrible smell around her that was making her eyes water, and she was soaked up to her ankles in dirty water. Maggie wanted to gag. Matty was walking ahead of them.
“That’s not Matty!” Maggie screamed, but the others wouldn’t look at her. No one was hearing her. Lilly was laughing at something that Matty said. “That’s not Matty! We have to get out of here! Please! Lilly! That’s not Matty!”
Maggie felt something squeeze her hand, and then she remembered. The terror had given way to excitement because Rich was there. If she turned her head she would be looking right at him, at his dopey smile, at the way his hand curved around hers so perfectly. Maggie took a steadying breath before turning, already smiling with anticipation and-
And Rich was dead. His eyes were white and unseeing.
Maggie screamed.
When she awoke she sat up in bed with a start, throwing herself from the mattress and stumbling towards the door.
“Mags, Maggie…” Went was half-asleep but still terrified at the sudden intrusion, blinking at her through the darkness.
Maggie ignored him, not stopping until she reached Richie’s room. Thoughtlessly, she opened the door and didn’t take a full breath until she caught sight of the soft rise and fall of his thin chest, cheek smushed into the pillow.
Went appeared behind her, grabbing her wrist softly. “Maggie?”
She stared at him for a moment until a sob bubbled up in her chest. Went pulled her into a tight embrace, hand laced through her long hair.
He never asked her any questions about that night. After that, she got better about muffling her post-nightmare cries into a pillow and forcing herself to wait and see Richie until the following morning.
At the beginning of the second grade, Richie made another friend; a boy named Bill Denbrough. Billy was a good boy. He wasn’t quiet like Stan but he wasn’t quite as hyper as Richie, and his folks seemed like good people. They had another toddler son of their own that loved following Bill and the boys around.
Bill came over for supper one night and Maggie, while Richie was in the washroom and Went was running late coming home from work, asked the boy how he and Richie had become friends.
“Some p-p-people a-at school wuh-were being mean t-to me a-about ha-having a stutter.” Bill explained. “R-Richie told them t-to stop.”
No good friends, no bad friends, only people you need to be with, Maggie thinks. Maybe Rich left his mark on her son after all, his heart and his compassion living within the boy even when he couldn’t.
Richie reminded her more of herself than she would like to admit. Sometimes, he made her laugh so hard at the dinner table that water would come out of her nose. She would watch him play pretend with Bill and Stan as cowboys, or tiger hunters, or soldiers, or British gentlemen.
And he had all these little voices for each role.
“When I’m older I’m gonna’ be the best horse wrangler in the entire country!” Richie announced to her in a thick, horrible country accent. He jumped off the couch and used his fingers to point a pretend gun at her forehead. “And I’m gonna’ be a criminal robber!”
“Don’t say you’re gonna’ be a criminal, Richie.” Maggie smacked his hand away, trying to stifle a laugh. Went walked into the room at the same time and Richie jumped onto his back and pointed his pretend finger-gun to the back of his head.
“Surrender or imma’ start shootin’, mistah!” Richie yelled, and Went tossed him over his back and onto the couch, tickling his sides until Richie was a blur of flailing limbs and uncontrollable laughter.
Another year goes by and another friend comes along; a little boy named Eddie Kaspbrak.
Eddie was cute as a button; he was a whole head shorter than Richie, Stan, and Bill, and he walked around wearing this little fanny pack fastened around his waist. Maggie adored Eddie. At first glance, he seemed quiet and polite like Stan, but once the four boys would get going, Maggie realized that Eddie was just as foul-mouthed and hyperactive as Richie.
Maggie loved Eddie but, God, she despised his mother.
“Tozier residence.”
“Is this Margaret Tozier?” A shrill voice barked from the other side of the phone.
Maggie cringed. “Speaking.”
“Now, you listen here, ma’am, I sent my little Eddie Bear to your house yesterday and he came home with a bruise on his leg!” Sonia Kaspbrak shouted hysterically. “I don’t know what you let your little loud-mouthed delinquent son get up to, but my Eddie is not like that! It is unacceptable that-”
Maggie lowered the phone from her ear. Richie was watching her from the couch with a comic book in his lap, clearly trying to eavesdrop.
“Mrs. Kaspbrak-”
“No! I’m serious! I don’t want my son playing with your son anymore! Not if you’re going to send him back to me bruised, oh my God-”
Richie jerked up from the couch, staring at her with wide eyes. She had never seen him so afraid in all her life. Maggie had let her continue on her tirade for another several minutes before hanging up, and by the time she had rounded the couch to see Richie’s face, the eight-year-old was crying.
“Richie?” Maggie asked, startled. “What’s…”
“Eddie’s mum said I can’t play with him anymore!” He cried hysterically, collapsing into Maggie’s lap. “Eddie was- Eddie is- I don’t wanna’ not play with Eddie ‘cause he’s my best friend!”
Maggie held the back of his head. She thought he was getting to the age where he didn’t want to be held by his mommy anymore, but maybe she was wrong. Or maybe the idea of losing Eddie had driven Richie to experience emotions that he hadn’t since he was a toddler.
“Don’t cry, sweetheart.” Maggie rubbed his little shoulder. “I’ll talk to Mrs. Kaspbrak, alright? But you have to promise me something, okay, Richie? You have to promise that you’ll look out for Eddie when he comes over. Make sure that he doesn’t get hurt.”
Richie nodded through his tears, but looked determined to keep his promise. “Okay. I promise, mom.”
After a very long conversation with Mrs. Kaspbrak, Eddie came back the following week for another playdate. Richie had briefly made eye contact with Maggie as the boys ran up the stairs, and she winked at him and held up her pinkie. He grinned and held his little pinkie up too before following Eddie upstairs.
Time went on and Richie grew up and he looked more and more like the boy from the missing poster every day. At night, she hears the clown’s voice vibrate around the inside of her skull, ricocheting like bullets, “Don’t you recognize your little boy?”
The summer of 1987, when Richie was eleven, they rented a cottage in Bar Harbour for two weeks. Maggie had never felt such peace in all her life. It’s like all the horrible stuff had been washed away by the Maine tide.
It was only after she returned that she realized that she hadn’t thought about the clown, or the fire, or Rich the whole time that they were away, and her soul felt heavier. It all came crashing back down on her and she could barely bring herself to get out of bed for days afterwards.
Maggie remembered what Will Hanlon told them about the Forgetting. It had to be true. There was no other explanation for why it would all vanish like it tumbled down a trap door, only to reappear like it had always been there. Even Richie hadn’t mentioned missing his friends once.
After days of searching, she found Lilly’s number in the phonebook. She was still living in Portland and her name was Lilly Day now. Maggie held the phone in her hands for a long time, staring at the number.
What would Maggie say to her? Would Lilly even remember her even after she reminded her who she was? Was Maggie now truly alone with all these horrible memories?
Lilly was the only person she had ever told about what It had said to her that day on the ice. She was the only person who could ever begin to understand the anguish that settled in Maggie’s heart when she thought about what future awaited the son whom she loved more than anything, the son that she knew of fourteen years before his existence.
Richie and his friends remained inseparable.
The four of them walked into the house after school. Maggie and Went just bought him a new set of comic books for his twelfth birthday and he was, no doubt, eager to show the boys. Maggie could already hear their voices all talking over each other in a cacophony of chaos.
“That’s what I said to your mother last night-”
“Shut up, Richie!” A voice that Maggie quickly decided was Eddie’s responded. “That’s so not funny.”
“The truth is rarely funny, Eddie Spaghetti.” Richie said. Maggie could hear the thumping that indicated they were all tossing their shoes off at the door.
“Oh, fuck off-”
“Shh! Richie’s mom is home!” Stanley’s voice whisper-shouted.
Four figures turned the corner to find Maggie sitting on the couch with a book. Bill, ever the parent-pleaser, was the first to speak. “Hi, Mrs. T-Tozier.”
“Hi, boys.” Maggie thought about chastising Richie for the distasteful joke, but when she was that age she said the same type of stuff to Lilly. “How was school?”
“Good.” Richie responded. “We had a substitute teacher in homeroom and she was hotter than-”
Eddie elbowed Richie in the stomach. “Beep Beep, Richie.”
“Beep Beep, Margie.”
Maggie gasped before she could stop herself. The boys were all staring at her in concern, startled by the outburst. It felt like a tight vice was clamped around her heart, squeezing tighter and tighter and
(“and it just might pop! So long, losers!”)
Maggie wanted to throw up, but the kids all looked half-afraid of her.
“What is…” She started unsurely, breathing hard. “Is that a- what does that mean? Beep Beep?”
“It’s just a joke we have, Mrs. Tozier.” Stan explained, looking sheepish, as if Maggie would scream at him. “We say it when Richie makes bad jokes. Like a car horn. Beep Beep.”
Maggie nodded too quickly. She felt like a bobblehead, like her head was coming loose from her neck. “That’s- that’s funny.”
Silence stretched between the five of them until Richie shuffled towards the stairs. She couldn’t tell if he looked more embarrassed by her strange behaviour or concerned for her. “We’re, uh, we’re gonna’ go read my comics, mom.”
Maggie let them go. She could hear the giddy laughter from upstairs; the sounds of childhood that she wished she could remember without the pang of grief stabbing her through the heart.
That October, Billy Denbrough’s little brother went missing.
Maggie thought about baking the Denbrough’s a casserole, but baking casseroles are what you do when somebody died, and Maggie didn’t want to give them the wrong message (even though, secretly, she had little hope that Georgie Denbrough was alive and wandering the woods around Derry).
Bill started spending a lot more time at the Toziers, but he was different. He was so quiet compared to how he was before, and when he did speak, his stutter was so bad that his words were practically incomprehensible.
Maggie thought about Phil Malkin and his little sister. She thought about the stench of their rotten little bodies and the way their eyes were milky and dead.
“Went.” Maggie whispered harshly to her husband while he reached over her shoulder to grab something from the cupboard. Bill and Richie were in the living room watching The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. “Go offer to throw a baseball around with Bill.”
Went gave her a strange look. “Why?”
She slapped him on the shoulder. “His little brother is de- missing and his parents hardly care about him. Go throw a ball.”
She watched Went toss a baseball around with Bill while Richie, who had never been interested in any sport despite Went trying just about everything with him, heckled them from the front porch.
Maggie didn’t think much about the little Denbrough boy’s disappearance. She thought about how horrible it was, how bad she felt for Bill’s parents and, of course, for sweet Bill himself, but the pieces hadn’t clicked into place until two months and three missing kids later.
A little girl vanished from her own backyard on Jackson street just a few days before Christmas. She was the granddaughter of Maggie’s childhood piano teacher. She had been the fourth child in Derry to go missing without a trace in just nine weeks.
Maggie found herself cracking open Richie’s door in the middle of the night to make sure he was still there several times a week. She found herself tapping her foot anxiously when Richie was late coming home from school (even though it was often the product of him going over to Eddie’s house without calling her), holding him that much tighter when she would press a kiss to his forehead before he would leave in the mornings.
Richie’s thirteenth birthday came around and a few months later, for the first time since he was eight years old, he made a new friend. Three new friends, to be specific.
For that first month of summer, Maggie hardly saw him, but she tried her best to catalogue the new characters in her son’s life.
There was a chubby boy who was new to town. He was sweet. She worried that Richie would make fun of him (she had heard the jokes that the boys had traded back and forth and they genuinely horrified her, sometimes), but Ben Hanscom seemed to fit right into the group.
Maggie was particularly surprised when she saw her son hanging out with a girl. Not just any girl, but Beverly Marsh. The Marsh girl had been subject to gossip at the tennis club since she was ten years old; mothers who said that they didn’t want that girl seducing their sons or influencing their daughters. Andrea Uris had once harshly whispered to Maggie, during the kids’ elementary school graduation, that she hoped that Beverly Marsh wouldn’t be in Stanley’s class next year. The Marsh family was not popular in Derry (everyone knew of Elfrida, who hung herself in Juniper Hill the previous fall, and Al, who… everyone knew about Al), and that rubbed off on little Beverly.
Maggie took pity on the poor girl. She knocked on the door one afternoon to pick up Richie with Bill, smiling politely but avoiding eye contact, sneaker scuffing against Maggie’s front porch. She was wearing overalls and a T-shirt and it allowed Maggie to see the purple bruise on her upper arm in the shape of a hand print.
Richie had bounced down the stairs to greet them before Maggie could say anything, and she watched the girl mount her bike and laugh at something Richie said. She wondered if Richie had a crush on her, with her short hair and pink cheeks and little overalls.
The third new friend of Richie’s that Maggie met made her feel like her insides were being ripped out.
Someone rang the doorbell and when Maggie had opened it, Will Hanlon was staring back at her. “Will?”
Will blinked, understanding dawning on his face and Will wasn’t Will at all. “No- uh, I’m… um, I’m Mike.”
Mike Hanlon. Will’s boy that had escaped the fire.
Maggie was sure that her face was blazing a deep red colour, regret filling every pore. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t- you just-”
“Did you know my dad?” Mike asked softly.
Maggie was struck with the sudden urge to cry. “I did, yeah. We, uh, we were very good friends when we were young.”
Mike smiled at her, and Maggie remembered the fog all over again.
“The seed of your stinking loins and his filthy friends bring me my death!”
Were these the friends It had told her about? Were these the seven children that would finally free Derry, that would do what Maggie, Lilly, Ronnie, Will, and Rich could never do and actually kill the monster?
It made her so angry. Why Richie? Why Mike? Why did these sweet boys, out of all the kids in Derry, have to be cosmically chosen to suffer? Is that why Will and Maggie had been drug into It’s orbit twenty-seven years ago, kicking and screaming?
On Independence Day, Maggie came home from the grocery store with Went holding grocery bags full of hotdogs and marshmallows and koolaid packets. They were hosting the bonfire at their house that night, and Maggie had hardly been paying attention when Richie bounded down the stairs and headed for the front door as she unloaded everything.
“Where are you going?” She asked absentmindedly, counting how skewers they had for the bonfire.
“Out with my friends.”
Maggie was just about to tell him to have fun when a memory came barging into her head so suddenly that she nearly lost her balance.
Missing: Richie Tozier. Last Seen: July 4th 1989.
She gasped, nearly tripping over herself in an attempt to get to Richie before he left. She slammed into the front door in the process, blocking it. Richie was staring at her like she had just grown a second head.
“You-you-you’re going out with your friends today?” Maggie asked, voice shaking.
“Uh-huh.” Richie said slowly. “We’re gonna’ get an ice cream downtown and watch the show in the square.”
“Do you know when you’ll be back?” Maggie knew that her voice sounded desperate, that she was about to fall apart at the seams, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was powerless to change fate, and it would be cruel of her to deny Derry their heroes, but she was so afraid.
“Um, I don’t know.” Richie shrugged, still looking at her suspiciously. “Maybe after dinner?”
Maggie pressed her lips together when she felt them quivering. She looked at her son and wanted to scream. If this was the last time… no, she couldn’t let herself think about that. She couldn’t spiral that far because she knew that she would never make it out of that hole. If she lost Richie like she lost Rich, if Derry took them both away from her, she would surely die. She knew that deep in her heart.
Maggie reached over to pull him into a tight hug. She pressed her hand to the back of his head and held it there against her chest, pressing her nose to his curls. She felt like he grew taller each time she hugged him, with his lanky arms and thin torso. He hugged her back no matter how confused he was.
“I love you, Richie.” Maggie whispered, just like she had to Rich.
Richie pulled back to look at her, eyes searching hers through his thick glasses. “I love you too.”
Richie returns that evening with Eddie in tow for a sleepover, unscathed and just as carefree as he had been that morning.
Maybe the clown was wrong. Maybe he lied to her. Maybe Richie would keep being the way he was, happy and lovely and frozen in those precious days of youth.
A week later, Richie returned from another day with his friends, covered in dirt and with a bruise forming under his eye. He barreled past her angrily in the hallway, not even looking at her.
“What’s-” Maggie started.
His bedroom door slammed.
Maggie didn’t see his friends for a month afterwards.
She longed to ask him what had happened, what had driven him away from the people that he spoke so highly about and looked up to so much, but she knew that she would never get a straight answer out of the kid. He was angry and quiet and barely even spoke to her and Went in his beloved voices. Maggie asked Went one night if she should say something to him.
“Just leave it alone, dear.” Went spoke through his toothbrush. Maggie was leaning against the doorway, watching him. “Kids fight. It happens. I got into a fight with my best friend when I was that age over a girl and we didn’t talk for six months. We got over it. He still sends me Christmas cards at the office.”
“These are his only friends, Went, and I don’t like knowing that he’s alone every day.” Maggie thought about the Patty Cakes and Ronnie and Lilly screaming at each other and the wrestling match that the three girls got into over the dagger. “You know, I saw Eddie Kaspbrak and his mother going into Keene’s yesterday. Eddie was wearing a cast. I bet it was that awful woman who did this. She probably got mad at all the kids because Eddie got hurt and-”
“Maggie.” Went cut her off. “It’ll pass. Trust me.”
Maggie doesn’t trust him, not with this. She trusts her husband with many things; keeping up a steady paycheque, making sure that Richie actually earns his allowance, making her laugh, not bringing up the fact that she still wakes up screaming about not being able to fit in the box, but this is not one of those things.
Not long after Richie stopped bringing the other kids around, he came home a second time in a mood that she had never seen before, but this one wasn’t angry like last time. This one was different.
She barely even saw him when he ran into the house, just a blur of limbs as he practically sprinted up the stairs and into his bedroom. Maggie was folding laundry and called up to him to ask if he was okay. No answer. Maggie walked up the stairs and paused at his closed door.
“Honey? You okay?”
“Go away!” He shouted back.
Maggie leaned closer to the wooden door, pressing her ear against it. She could hear sobbing from the other side, so visceral and horrible. He hadn’t cried like that since he was eight years old and Sonia Kaspbrak threatened to never let him see Eddie again.
Against her better judgement and all those new-age parenting techniques in the magazines that call for teenage privacy, Maggie cracked the door open. Richie was lying across his bed, face pressed against his pillow, body shaking with the force of his cries.
“Richie?” Maggie stepped closer, heart breaking in her chest. “What happened?”
“Nothing!” Richie said, voice cracking. His glasses were discarded next to him on his pillow. “I said go away. I don’t wanna’ talk right now.”
Maggie sat on the edge of the bed. She slowly placed a hand on the center of Richie’s back, smiling slightly when he didn’t pull away. “You can tell me anything. You know that.”
Richie shook his head. It was silent between them for several minutes until Richie lifted his head to look at her with bloodshot eyes, lip quivering. He looked so much like a little boy again that it nearly took Maggie’s breath away.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“For what?”
“That I’m… that… that I’m like this.” Richie cried, dissolving into fresh tears. “I’m sorry. ‘M so sorry. I wish I was… I wish I was normal.”
Maggie shook her head, lost. She knew Richie got bullied sometimes in school, knew that he was an easy target for the other kids with his thick glasses and Hawaiian shirts. It had never seemed to bother him before, but maybe the glaring absence of his friends put into perspective how truly alone he felt.
“Richie…” Maggie rubbed his back.
“Can you just…” Richie sniffed, looking down. “Can you lay down with me for a while?”
He hadn’t asked her that in many years. Maggie smiled and nodded, wriggling down under the covers beside Richie. Afternoon sunlight was filtering through the cracks in the blinds above his bed, casting lines across his youthful face, and Maggie loved him so much.
She didn’t know what to do with all the hurt he felt, all the sadness, and she didn’t understand why he felt so abnormal.
“You know…” Maggie started, mouth moving without her permission, like her heart made the decision without consulting her mind. “I named you after the bravest person I ever knew.”
Richie’s cries paused, eyes flicking across her face. “Huh?”
She smiled at him despite the tears she could feel welling her eyes. “When I was your age, I was friends with a boy named-” Her breath hitched. She cleared her throat before continuing, “A boy named Rich, and he was… he was the best. He was so funny, and so kind and I…”
Richie was staring at her, hanging onto each word.
“I loved him so much.”
His eyes widened. It was probably impossible for him to imagine; his mother, young and madly in love with someone that wasn’t Wentworth Tozier.
“There was… a horrible thing happened to us, Richie. There was a fire and- and Rich and I were trapped.” Maggie gulped back her tears. “And Rich saved me. He saved my life. He died saving my life, and it was the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”
Maggie mopped up the tears with the back of her hand, not looking at Richie. She hadn’t told that story in years; she was worried that she would forget all the important parts.
But maybe those important parts would be for just her and Rich.
Before Richie could respond, Maggie grabbed him by the shoulders to look him square in the face. “Richie, if you love someone, you need to promise me that you’ll tell them. You can’t wait for the right moment or worry about what other people will think or- or worry that they won’t like you back. Because things happen and people die and you need to promise me that the girl that you fall in love with knows how much you love her, okay?”
Richie cleared his throat hesitantly. “Mom…”
“And maybe it doesn’t feel like it right now, but there’s a girl out there who is going to love you so much, Richie, and you have to tell her how much you love her too, even if it’s scary.”
The expression he had been wearing a moment before, one of fear mixed with determination, melted at her words. Maggie couldn’t tell if it was a good thing or a bad thing. The two didn’t say anything more to each other, letting the afternoon sun turn into a quiet evening.
It was that night after Richie had gone to bed and Went was fast asleep that Maggie had untangled herself from her husband’s arms (there was this guilty part of her that felt horrible for never telling him about Rich and for still holding onto him all these years later, and Maggie was struck with the inherent need to fix it) and tip-toed into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
Maggie turned with the glass in her hand to the window that faced the backyard just like she always did. She enjoyed watching the way that the moonlight shimmered on the soft-blowing grass. Tonight, though, there was a figure standing in the middle of the backyard, a figure that looked just like-
She flinched backwards. The glass slipped from her hand and shattered onto the floor. It was the clown, and he was staring back at her.
“Duck and cover, kiddos.”
“Margaret Tozier…” It sang gleefully, showing off It’s row of terrifyingly sharp teeth. “His fear smells so sweet.”
Maggie screamed. Beyond the fear that was too intense to fully comprehend (a kind so sharp and dangerous that she hadn’t felt since she was thirteen), was all-consuming rage. Visceral rage.
“Fuck you!” Maggie lunged forward and slapped her hands against the window. It’s grin didn’t drop. “Don’t you fucking touch my son!”
The clown giggled manically and was gone in a blink.
Maggie didn’t sleep for two days.
A couple weeks after the day Richie came home crying, his friends were back as if they had never left. They laughed and joked and bickered like they all had before, but there was something distinctly different about them that Maggie couldn’t put her finger on. They seemed… mature in a way that he hadn’t before, like there was this private understanding between them that was just for the seven of them to understand.
Just like when they were kids, Richie still spent the most time with Eddie.
Maggie walked by Richie’s closed bedroom door around midnight and heard laughter inside. She paused, confused because as far as she knew there was no one else in the house besides her, Went, and Richie, so she stood where she was until she heard a whispering voice that she recognized to be Eddie’s.
Huh, Maggie thought. Little Eddie Kaspbrak sneaking out on a school night. She didn’t think he had it in him.
Another time, Maggie and Went came home from a date night to the Chinese place downtown and found Richie and Eddie watching TV on the couch. Eddie was chastising Richie about something, bickering at him like they were an old married couple.
Eventually, some of Richie’s friends started to leave Derry, but Eddie always stayed. The Marsh girl finally got away from her father and the Denbroughs moved out of state. Richie complained to Maggie sometimes about how neither of them ever called or wrote to him after they left.
Maggie longed to tell him about the Forgetting, but then all the questions she had about the clown and this summer would be out in the open and Maggie didn’t think she could handle his answer.
Maggie did laundry one Saturday morning in April, a month after Richie’s fourteenth birthday, and dug around underneath his bed to find the socks that she knew so often got discarded down there.
As she was moving to stand, knees popping (at forty-one, she was far from the hyperactive girl she once was that used to be able to do handstands and sprint through the sewers), Maggie noticed a white triangle sticking out from underneath the mattress; the corner of a stack of papers, she realized.
Maggie pulled the corner out, quickly recognizing the glossy feel as a magazine. When it was free from the confines of Richie’s mattress, Maggie just stared at it.
It was a Playgirl. A Playgirl with a very naked man on the front, covered from the waist down with a thin white sheet.
Why would Richie have a Playgirl if he was a…
Maggie slapped a hand over her mouth. She thought back to the previous summer, when Richie had come home crying and apologizing for being ‘like this.’ She thought back to the way his face fell when she told him that there was a girl somewhere in the world waiting for him. She thought back to when Richie was seven years old and was utterly obsessed with Captain America and had told Maggie that he thought Steve Rogers was just so pretty, until Maggie gently corrected him that girls were pretty and boys were handsome. She thought back to when Richie asked her in kindergarten since girls at cooties, if he kissed a boy would he still get cooties.
An idiot. Maggie was an idiot.
When Richie came home from Stanley’s house that night, Maggie just smiled at him, trying to convey how infinite her love was for her boy without saying a single word.
Maggie didn’t tell Went. She thought about it, oh, how she thought about it. It felt like she was keeping some horrible secret from him, but then she thought of Richie and how he had been keeping this from them for God knows how long and she couldn’t betray him like that, not when the boy didn’t even know that she knew.
Another couple months went by and Richie left to go to the movies with Eddie.
Maggie watched them from the doorway. Eddie came by to pick Richie up on his bike because Richie’s had a flat tire. Richie climbed onto the back, arms wrapped around Eddie’s waist.
Maggie couldn’t hear what they were saying from her spot inside the house but she could see their mouths moving. Richie said something (probably a tasteless joke about Eddie’s mother, because Maggie knows her son very well) and Eddie elbowed him.
Eddie turned back to look at Richie and it was the look on Richie’s face that made everything click into place for Maggie.
Richie smiled gently at him, entire face softening like the mere sight of Eddie looking at him could rip him apart and piece him back together simultaneously.
“Later, when I figured it out, I remember thinking what I should’ve said back. ‘I wish I could’”.
Rich. Her Rich. He was still here. He was still alive in Richie and in Eddie.
A half-sob, half-laugh busted from Maggie before she could stop it. She covered her mouth, tears welling in her eyes as she watched the boys. Eddie was laughing about something as they biked away.
How could she not have realized it sooner? Maggie had teased Richie all summer about her suspicion that he had a crush on Beverly Marsh, when the truth had been under her nose the whole time. It was Eddie. It was always Eddie. Little Eddie Kaspbrak had stolen her son’s heart just like Rich Santos had with hers twenty-eight years ago.
At the top of 1991, Went took Maggie out to a fancy dinner and bought her a new diamond bracelet and told her that his boss offered him a promotion that came with a huge pay raise.
“Then why are you trying to bribe me into accepting something that sounds like good news?” Maggie asked, arms crossed suspiciously in her chair.
"The, uh, the new position is in Philadelphia.”
Maggie refused to give Went a clear answer until she thought about it, which took about three weeks.
She could count on one hand the number of times she had left Derry in forty-two years, and like a moth drawn to the flame, she always returned. For a while, she wondered if she could just get out of this town, would she change the future that the clown had told her about? Could she change Richie’s fate? But fate had never been kind enough to set her free, and Derry remained her home.
Maggie told Went to go ahead and tell his boss to accept the promotion on the condition that the move wouldn’t take place until the summer time, so that Richie could finish out his freshmen year of high school in Derry.
Maybe forgetting is kinder than remembering, Maggie thought as she watched Richie hug the boys goodbye that July morning that they left. Maggie thought about her own childhood and all the horrors that had stayed with her, a mark on her heart and soul, and yes, maybe it was a good deal that if you managed to survive Derry you got to forget about it entirely.
But that didn’t just mean forgetting the fire and her eyes and the fog. It meant forgetting Will, with his winning smile and undying loyalty. It meant forgetting Ronnie, who held Marge so tight outside of the Black Spot, trying to piece her back together when all she wanted to do was reignite the flames and take her place beside the only boy she had ever loved. It meant forgetting Lilly, her first friend, her lifeboat.
It meant forgetting Rich, her knight, who was the reason she was alive and able to forget anything at all.
Richie hugged Eddie last. When her son climbed into the backseat, next to the boxes of his childhood that were piled up across the car, he was crying.
They got to Philadelphia eight hours later.
Within a week, Maggie couldn’t recall a single detail of her childhood in Derry. She didn’t know it then, but she wouldn’t remember Derry for another twenty-five years.
Richie graduated high school in 1994 and Maggie cried in the gymnasium. Went rubbed her back and did an admirably good job at hiding his laughter.
Before summer was over, Richie moved to Los Angeles. Maggie nearly had a heart attack when he first broke the news to them. She couldn’t picture her son, who had been faithfully by her side since the day he was born, across the country with no one to run home to. He explained to her that he wanted to try his hand at stand-up comedy, and in the meantime, he had a nice job set up at a radio station.
Maggie and Went had encouraged him repeatedly throughout high school to apply to college. Richie was a smart boy and he could get a good job if he really put his mind to it, maybe even being a dentist, like his father. Richie wasn’t so keen on the idea.
Maggie tuned in as often as she could to hear him on the radio. He was funny, and he did all these voices that had his co-host in stitches. He told Maggie that on the weekends he did open mic nights at the local comedy club and that people seemed to like him.
Five years after he moved to California, he became enough of a big shot that he quit the radio station and started working as a comedian full time. He even got his own special on the TV and everything.
She didn’t fully understand his career, but when she visited him in Los Angeles and saw the size of his house and the people outside with cameras who snapped pictures of him when he would be doing something as simple as getting coffee, she was happy for him.
“Mom! I got SNL!” Richie announced to her on the phone one day. His thirty-fourth birthday had just passed.
“Oh, is that the one with the really handsome guy? Seth-what’s-his-name?”
“Yeah, it’s the biggest show on TV, mom.” Richie sighed. She could hear chatter in the background. “I’m hosting it this summer.”
“Congratulations, honey.” Maggie thought that might be the show he used to watch obsessively as a kid. It’s how he would practice his voices. “You should come to see us soon. I found this old picture of you from-”
“Okay, Steve, I’m just- you know what? Sorry, mom, I gotta’ go. There’s a lot going on here right now. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Went died the following year. He had a heart attack and collapsed at work. The twelve-year-old girl who had been getting her braces tightened had run out of the room to find help, blood smeared around her mouth, shouting incoherently that Dr. Tozier had fallen over and died.
Richie flew to Philadelphia for the funeral and held Maggie’s hand tight. He stayed with her at the house for a week, making her breakfast and running errands. He looked so different these days. Maggie knew logically that was how time and growing up worked, but when she looked at her son he looked a lot less like her (like he used to when he was a little boy) and a lot more like Went.
Richie eventually went back to Los Angeles and got even more famous and Maggie picked up gardening. She became good friends with the young woman who lived next door, who seemed awestruck when she discovered that Maggie was Richie Tozier’s mother. Maggie started going to water aerobics even though it made her feel horribly old, and she rescued an Irish Terrier named Bear from the animal shelter just to make the loneliness of the empty house feel less imposing.
Then, one morning over two decades after she had left Derry, Maggie woke up with this horrible weight on her chest.
It came to her all at once. The saw she used on her eyes. The bodies in the sewers. Matty turning into the clown. The fire. The fog on the ice. The missing poster that had haunted her for years.
Lilly. Will. Ronnie. Rich.
Oh, Rich.
Maggie cried and cried. Her memories of her life before Went moved them to Philadelphia had always felt like a trap door; everything was there, but the second she tried to focus on it, it vanished like it had never existed at all. She couldn’t understand why it was all coming back to her at once, why all she could think of was the sound of Rich choking on nothing when she hadn’t thought of that in twenty-five years.
Three days later, Richie showed up on her doorstep.
“Mom.” He broke when he saw her, tears streaming down his face. She took him into her arms, even though she was nearly half his height and her bones felt more brittle each day, she hugged him tight because she was his mother and still, after all these years, he was her little boy. “Mom.”
Something settled into Maggie’s heart. Something final.
“Did you do it?” She whispered. “Did you kill the sonofa bitch, Richie?”
Richie pulled back to look at her. He looked bewildered. “How did…”
“He told me when I was thirteen that it would be you.”
Understanding passed between them. She could see that Richie had a million questions, that he needed to know the story more than he needed anything, but for now, he just cried. Maggie held him close and allowed the knowledge that her son finally did what she could never do to settle in her bones.
“Eddie’s gone.” Richie finally said through his tears. “Eddie’s dead, and I never…”
“I love you, Rich.”
“I love you too, Marge.”
“Oh, Richie.” Maggie always knew that her son was just like her. He had her bad eyesight, her odd humour, her cosmic target on her back. And now, he felt the weight of her loss. He had to live with the knowledge that the person he loved the most died so he could live, even if it felt like there was nothing to live for.
The story did not come out all at once.
Maggie and Richie took turns swapping traumas and nightmares and good stories about their friends over the course of several years. Maggie told him about the one horrible month in the seventh grade, and in return, Richie told him about the summer of 1989 and the two days that he had spent in Derry as an adult, where he lost things that he didn’t know he could lose. They cried and they laughed and Maggie didn't have anything left in her to be angry at everything they had gone through.
Almost eight years to the day after Richie turned up on her doorstep, Maggie died. Cancer. She was seventy-five. Richie was by her side in the hospital bed, holding her hand. The last thing she heard, fading in and out of consciousness as an endless void of black covered her vision was, “Goodnight, mom.”
When Marge came to, she was thirteen again, wearing a yellow sweater and a grey skirt. There was a string tied around her finger. The building she was in front of looked so familiar, but she couldn’t quite place her finger on it until she heard the music echoing through the windows.
The Black Spot. For the first time, Marge wasn’t afraid. She opened the door and light blinded her for a single moment before she saw him, standing in the center of the room with a pair of drumsticks in his back pocket. He was smiling. Marge realized that she was smiling, too.
“Rich.”